A Versailles Christmas-Tide eBook

Of a former visit to Versailles we had retained little
more than the usual tourist’s recollection of
a hurried run through a palace of fatiguing magnificence,
a confusing peep at the Trianons, a glance around
the gorgeous state equipages, an unsatisfactory meal
at one of the open-air cafes, and a scamper
back to Paris. But our winter residence in the
quaint old town revealed to us the existence of a life
that is all its own—­a life widely variant,
in its calm repose, from the bustle and gaiety of
the capital, but one that is replete with charm, and
abounding in picturesque-interest.

[Illustration: Automoblesse Oblige]

Versailles is not ancient; it is old, completely old.
Since the fall of the Second Empire it has stood still.
Most of the clocks have run down, as though they realised
the futility of trying to keep pace with the rest
of the world. The future merges into the present,
the present fades into the past, and still the clocks
of Versailles point to the same long eventide.

[Illustration: Sable Garb]

The proximity of Paris is evinced only by the vividly
tinted automobiles that make Versailles their goal.
Even they rarely tarry in the old town, but, turning
at the Chateau gates, lose no time in retracing their
impetuous flight towards a city whose usages accord
better with their creed of feverish hurry-scurry than
do the conventions of reposeful Versailles. And
these fiery chariots of modernity, with their ghoulish,
fur-garbed, and hideously spectacled occupants, once
their raucous, cigale-like birr-r-r has died away
in the distance, leave infinitely less impression
on the placid life of Versailles than do their wheels
on the roads they traverse. Under the grand trees
of the wide avenues the townsfolk move quietly about,
busying themselves with their own affairs and practising
their little economies as they have been doing any
time during the last century.

Perhaps it was the emphatic and demonstrative nature
of the mourning worn that gave us the idea that the
better-class female population of Versailles consisted
chiefly of widows. When walking abroad we seemed
incessantly to encounter widows: widows young
and old, from the aged to the absurdly immature.
It was only after a period of bewilderment that it
dawned upon us that the sepulchral garb and heavy crape
veils reaching from head to heel were not necessarily
the emblems of widowhood, but might signify some state
of minor bereavement. In Britain a display of
black such as is an everyday sight at Versailles is
undreamt of, and one saw more crape veils in a day
in Versailles than in London in a week. Little
girls, though their legs might be uncovered, had their
chubby features shrouded in disfiguring gauze and to
our unaccustomed foreign eyes a genuine widow represented
nothing more shapely than a more or less stubby pillar
festooned with crape.

But for an inborn conviction that a frugal race like
the French would not invest in a plethora of mourning
garb only to cast it aside after a few months’
wear, and that therefore the period of wearing the
willow must be greatly protracted, we would have been
haunted by the idea that the adult male mortality
of Versailles was enormous.